Indonesian BlackBerry Overseas

Happy New Year and all that and this is my first Blog of the 2011. Ironically written on the 1/1/11 which is nice!!!

I just wanted share some information about using mobile phones from Indonesia in other countries and how to get around the feeling of isolation once your Blackberry Messenger, Email, FB, Twitter etc are all not able to be automatically updated over the air.
The majority of networks found in Indonesia have links to other countries networks for a price and so you can, if you can afford it, 'piggyback' off that and carry on.
If like me you have IM3, then you are stuck, thats for sure and with my recent trip to England and 3 day forced stop over in the middle east (namely Qatar) contacting friends and relatives is a must.
My network unsurprisingly has no access to the networks in Qatar (Qatel and Vodaphone) and again no access to the UK ones (3, Vodaphone, Orange, T mobile etc) and this has caused a few problems and also released me from the stress of a constantly beeping and vibrating machine who like a hungry child demands attention all the time.
Luckily for me, my girlfriend gave me some useful advice and that was to connect into the wireless signal where ever you were.
So at Doha Airport, I eventually connected to the signal there and got full Blackberry services including Messenger which was fantastic. In the hotel again it was wireless so I had access to everything. The mall I went to in the city had no wireless connection I could find which again was annoying but not the end of the world. Even the Starbucks offered no wireless service.
In England I used Lebara which was ok as a provider but it did not allow me internet just sms and calls which were free to other Lebara users but as no one seemed to have heard of them I was not able to take advantage of it.
I could have used any other of the networks but that would have been more expensive.

Again I managed to use Wireless networks in different places I visited to take the opportunity of catching up with  email etc where I could. However in some places I could only do that with the mobile signal switched off first and then switched back on once connected into the wireless network.

At the end of the day the Blackberry's connection into a wireless network was seamless and very simple and I am very pleased I could do that.